From A Former Inmate: How Private Prisons Can Protect Inmates

Ms. Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries and is author of "Up the River: An Anthology" (Bleakhouse Press).

The main gate of the Leavenworth Detention Center of Corrections Corporation of America on August 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Four days before the United States Department of Justice announced it would phase out its use of private management companies for federal prisons, the Washington Post revealed that the Obama Administration entered into a $1 billion, no-bid contract with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison management firm in the country, to build a detention center for asylum seekers. Perhaps the federal government isn’t as disappointed by private prisons as it claims to be.

If that’s true, then the problem with private prisons was never who was running the prison (a private company), but how the prisons were run. A closer look at this no-bid contract with CCA reveals a new way to work with private business with the potential to make privatization of penitentiaries benefit the inmates.

As someone who spent over six years in a state-run facility, I knew of the problems with private prisons--inadequate healthcare, more violence, escapes that ended up deadly for innocent bystanders--through news reports that would smuggle themselves in amongst other headlines. I witnessed daily chaos in a public prison--inadequate healthcare, astronomical sums in overtime paid to guards whose abuse was essentially sanctioned by unions, reentry counselors bound by red tape--and it made me wonder what was greener on the public side.

These failures didn’t happen because the prisons are private and managed according to a business model. We see these boondoggles because the federal government perversely incentivized the companies and paid them on the number of people they housed, not the number of people they helped. This led to overcrowding and understaffing that made these institutions dangerous for anyone who entered them.

But the contract that the Obama Administration just entered into with CCA doesn’t incentivize businesses like that. The new agreement with CCA doesn’t pay the contractor based on the number of people it locks up. Instead, CCA will receive the same payment regardless of the number of people the facility holds. Some might argue that CCA has good reason to support decarceration efforts now to keep costs low and still be paid the agreed-upon fee by the government.

For someone like me who knows life inside, a largest tragedy of prison privatization isn’t the human abuses that happen inside facilities or even that someone made money off these atrocities. The problem is that these companies squandered an opportunity for innovation in how to help people and still make money. Advances in correctional efficiency would have provided competition to government facilities and been the proverbial rising tide for the over 2.2 million people who are incarcerated in this country as prisons and jails looked for the cheapest way to do the most good.

Instead, the mismanagement of private prisons gave a perfect foil to poorly-run public facilities and made it worse for prisoners. Prison time could have been a lot easier for me--and for many people in government-managed institutions--if private prison companies didn’t just seek to cut costs at all costs and make a mess of the idea that reform can be done well, even at a profit.

But no one is looking to close down these facilities or change their management, and not because they’re well-run, but because they’re publicly-run. From a human rights perspective, that doesn’t make any sense.

Just the threat of privatization--even if its poorly implemented--has already caused some improvement in public corrections departments. When Governor Dannell P. Malloy floated the idea of privatization of state services in 2011, his announcement seemed to usher in an era more responsive to prisoner abuse.

Since 2011, guards have been arrested and charged with misconduct stemming from their behavior at work--five of them in the last 18 months, four of those five at York Correctional Institution where I was. In the early years of my sentence, before the scent of privatization was wafting around, such a response to prisoner abuse was unheard of in the state.

The opportunity for private, and for us all

Because private prisons are known to be so poorly managed, the competitive threat posed by them to public institutions isn’t enough to cause complete efficiency and total behavioral overhauls.

But if private facilities were to be well-run, then market forces might cause a needed shift in how public prisons treat their inmates. It might be prisoners’ last chance for humane treatment, since exhortations to basic decency and U.N. resolutions have failed them for decades.

Privatization itself isn’t the problem in corrections. Now that the federal government has found a new way to incentivize the private sector as they run penitentiaries, we might see improvement in how inmates are treated because government will face worthy competitors.